Monday, April 30, 2012

Alright, I've been thinking about this for awhile...how to
approach the subject.

Before I do, let me throw a few things at you, so you know
where I'm coming from:

I'm essentially an atheist, but you knew that right?. I
don't like being associated with atheists because saying you're an atheist
creates all sorts of connotations, the most obvious being "You're stupid
for believing in god". Mainstream atheism (or at least the perception of
it) is that it's confrontational and evangelical.

Science and reason is a starting point, and a means. It
is not the endpoint, or an end in itself. So I tend not to get hung up on it,
or get in arguments with people over science vs. religion. PARTICULARLY if the
spiritual/atheistic person isn't intelligent enough to understand the argument.
Fundamentalism, either scientific or religious, is a problem. The left has the
same problem, identifying anyone on the right as stupid, uncaring, and
wrong-headed. THIS is why Bush won a second term....

Confirmation bias and systems-thinking orientation. I have
'rational/scientific' friends. I have conspiratorial friends. I have political,
postmodern, and spiritual friends. All these friends look at the world though a
set of lenses (their system of understanding), however I don't really have any
friends who are able to employ more than one of these systems.

Funny thing is, all these people are convinced that they're
right, and that their way of understanding the world is the one true way.

Problem is, the world is full of people, with all these
different knowledge systems. And those systems guide their behavior. If you
want to understand why someone does something, you need to understand their
motivation, and how they look at the world. Unfortunately, not many people are
doing this. And for those who CAN do this, seldom have they weighed the pros
and cons of the other knowledge system. They’ve only looked at it from their
own knowledge system, to find the holes to attack, so they can feel confident
and secure in their belief that their own knowledge system is the best
knowledge system.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

The only thing that will get us out of this mess of a depression is something on the scale of WWII. But this time, it might not be a war.

Given the shambles that NASA finds itself, particularly in terms of manned spaceflight, something has to give.Towards the end of 2012, we're going to come to the 'realization' that there's something on Mars, that needs to be investigated. This is the idea introduced by Arthur C. Clarke in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

I call it this, because everyone in America, and much of the Western World, has been lied to about some basic facts of life. These facts concern an idea fundamental to Western thought in the Modern Tradition, and that is the idea of progress.

Basically, we're all told things will get better with time. Science advances, society becomes more progressive, and the economy grows, so your standard of living will be better than that of your parents, and that your children will have it better than you did.

Without going into the philosophical arguments for this, I want to point out one simple fact: since the early Clinton Administration, we've been lied to about the growth of the economy.

So, what does this graph show? Simply, it shows the old measure of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in blue, vs. the new measure of GDP, in red. GDP is used to measure if the economy is growing or shrinking. Basically, the Clinton Admin changed the way GDP was measured, so that the economy looked better than it really was.

What does this mean for you? It means for the last 20 years or so, (look at the blue line) the economy has been declining, and in recession for almost all of the 21st Century. This decline was hidden during the 1990s. The 'average' of the red graph is almost a straight line, showing constant growth, while the 'average' of the blue line shows a steady decline. The red line starts to give up after 2000 and the average can't hide the decline anymore, while the blue line continues the steady decline into negative growth.

So, in practical terms, things have been getting worse. But living with the belief that things get better, many people have had to rely on credit cards and refinancing their homes in order to MAINTAIN a standard of living from 20 years ago!

Don't believe the lies! The mainsteam media wants you to believe that the bubble and housing crisis was purely the result of people being too excited, and greedy, and wanting more and more. Yes, this is true for some people, but many others were living at the same standard they always did, not realizing it was getting harder and harder to maintain that standard.

Why didn't they know? Because a bunch of economists decided to change the methodology of economic measures.

What does this chart represent? It shows inflation, which is the change in prices over time. For example, something that cost $1.00 in 1990 now costs roughly $2.00.* Things get more expensive with time. Look at that graph! Using the old measure, (the blue line), inflation has been approaching 10% for the entire 21st Century.

What does this cart mean for you? Well, the Clinton Administration also changed the way inflation was measured. Before, they'd take a bunch of food, and things people typically need to live (called a basket of goods) and measure how much it cost. Then, each month, they'd compare the cost this month to the cost last month, and tell you how much more expensive things are. That's inflation. They were measuring changes in the cost of living.

But now, with changes in the methodology, they use several techniques to change the measured rate of inflation. I'll explain one of them here, called substitution.

Well, this makes sense. It shows how people behave, and how much money they're spending, right?

WRONG! While it may reflect consumer behavior, it's no longer measuring the cost of LIVING, now it's measuring the cost of SURVIVING. Making substitutions of better quality foods for lower quality foods means you're just surviving. There's a big difference. They actually changed what they're measuring, but didn't tell you.

There are other things they do, but this is a big one because it's easy to see how you're being lied to!

As the story goes:

A little before the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, was told that the peasants couldn't afford to buy bread, because of the heavy taxation.
She callously replied, "Well, let them eat cake."
Soon after, the French Revolution began.

Well, The System is telling the American people is exactly the same: can't afford butter? Eat margarine instead.

Money is called a fiat currency, because it's used in place of something of value.

In the old days, people traded goods. Sugar for meat, or horseshoes for people shoes. You made something, and you traded away your surplus for other goods you wanted.

Well, if you grew corn, and the cobbler didn't like corn, you were out of luck...you couldn't get shoes. So, you'd have to trade corn with someone who had what the cobbler wanted, so you could trade that with the cobbler instead.

So, we switched to gold and silver, since everyone agreed that they had value. But gold gets heavy, so after awhile, we switched to pieces of paper that represent the gold or silver. 1 piece of paper can mean 1 cob of corn, or one shoe, or whatever. This is the purpose of money...to make trading easier than trading the things themselves.

But in our modern world, the money has been taken control of in two fundamentally corrupt ways. Compound interest-bearing debt, and the creation of money from nothing. Let me explain:

Let's imagine that we're going to create a new society. Let's make our society 10 people, and each person needs 10 pieces of paper to swap with other people so we can do trade.

But in this society, we can't just make the paper. We're forced to BORROW the paper from a central bank. Where do they get it? The same place anyone would. They print it FROM THIN AIR. Now, we have to go into debt to get that paper, and pay the debt back, with interest.

So we borrow $100 for our society, at 10% interest, and we'll pay it back next year. But when it comes time to pay it back, we owe the bank $110! That's more money than exists in our entire society! We pay back the original $100, but still owe $10 to the bank. AND our society has no money again! So we borrow $110 this time, and give $10 to the bank (for what we owed them) and keep the $100 for our society to use this year.

At the end of the second year, we owe the bank the original $110 (remember, we gave them back $10 instantly and kept $100 for our society), plus $11 in interest for the loan. So we have even more debt! Now we owe the bank $121 for the $100 in our society!

But of course, we only have $100, so we need to borrow the extra $21, just to pay them back. And we need $100 again for this year. It's not hard to see how the Central Bank can come to own and rule a country very quickly using this system.

So, there are two equally important, corrupted aspects of money supply:

Eliminate Interest-Incurring Currency
Earning interest for pieces of paper that say IOU is just plain WRONG. It's the ultimate business, and totally unethical. Government needs to take control of the issuance of money, and make it free for us to use (i.e. there's no cost associated with creating it). So money is a public service provided by the government, and no profit is made from the creation of money. No interest-bearing money creation means no ponzi scheme, and no built-in collapse.

Responsible Control of the Supply of Currency
The amount of money in system effects how well the system can do business. Too much money, and prices go up, and bubbles form. Too little money, and recession kicks in, because nobody can get the money (IOUs) they need to engage in trade. If it gets really bad, they start to barter, but that's the whole reason money was created in the first place...to make barter unnecessary. So the amount of money is very important to make sure the economy runs smoothly. Central Banks create boom/bust cycles by controlling the amount of money in the system.

Many people believe in the gold standard because they believe nobody can be trusted with creating money from nothing. It's too great a power. If you can print money from thin air, then you can do that to buy or control anything. By tying money to gold, you have some 'objective' way of controlling how much money is created. This is a separate debate.

One last thing about money in the US:

The US dollar is the "Reserve Currency". Basically this means that the US forced the world to use its money to buy and sell oil. This means the Federal Reserve can print lots of money to fight wars, pacify its citizens, and buy anything it wants, without making the money worthless. Countries are forced to buy US dollars to buy oil, or other goods. This creates additional demand, and keeps the US dollar stronger than it would otherwise be.